Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, While torrential slush that roars Burns in the blackness of the spring. Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas, Race through the noice of bells and wheels To where the ink and all you grieving Are muffled when the rainshower falls. To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal, A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees, Fall down into the puddles, hurl Dry sadness deep into the eyes. Below, the wet black earth shows through, With sudden cries the wind is pitted, The more haphazard, the more true The poetry that sobs its heart out.

I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.

Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.

In this era of world wars, in this atomic age, values have changed. We have learned that we are guests of existence, travelers between two stations. We must discover security within ourselves.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.